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Though the Oculus Rift won’t be able to let you live in a virtual world, it will have a game you can play about being a man reliving his life in a virtual world. That’s Loading Human’s concept: you are an obscure novelist dying of Alzheimer’s disease. You’ve been placed in a virtual world to essentially reboot yourself. The Rift will stick you in his memories, and the game will enable you to interact with the world, using external controllers to move your hands.
I like the idea. Developers Untold Games are looking to make more of the Rift than just a floating head: the trailer has the player using the Sixense STEM and Razer Hydra to track his hand’s positions in the world, which enables some complex object manipulation: tugging a record out of a sleeve is a neat way to prove the concept. That said, surely using two bespoke controllers can only limit the potential userbase?

The first 30 seconds are essentially worthless, and the VO and script has all the passion of the speaking clock, but the concept is nice.

Adam will be seeing this next month. I hope he doesn’t have so much fun dialing phones and putting keys in locks that he subsumes into the program.

19 Comments

There are some ideas to basically use cameras and image recognition to monitor your hands (Forgot the name of that thingy). But i don’t think thats a better solution that Stem, Hydra, Controller, Mouse+Keyboard and so on, because you will miss the haptic feedback.

The feel on your fingertips is pretty important and the reason why all those holographic interfaces you keep seeing in games, movies and TV-Shows are just a terrible idea.

OK: is the Oculus Rift for sale? Can it be purchased and used? If not, when will it be released? Because I’m extraordinarily tired of hearing about something that nobody seems to be able to use outside of prototype/proof-of-concept scenarios.

Thousands of regular people got them more than a year ago from the Kickstarter, but now you can buy one (a prototype, NOT the finished product) for $300 from their website and be using whatever software you can find that works with it, including many existing games that support it to varying degrees. The actual consumer-targeted version is supposed to be ready around the end of this year.

Don’t get the prototype. I have one. It is fucking amazing. When you use it, you will taste the future. You will look left, and shift tracks left exactly with your head motion. You look right, and HOLY SHIT!!!11!!! your view looks right with near perfect synchronization.

The problem is that the prototype is just a taste of awesome.

The problem with the prototype is that the screen resolution is too damn low. You can play TF2 with thing. I have done it. It fucking works. It is awesome. On your first try you won’t beat a traditional screen + mouse and keyboard setup, but you won’t be far behind… but you also won’t be able to read any of the text from chat because the resolution is too low. It really just boils down to the resolution being too low. They know this. The commercial version is going to fix it.

My advice to people interested in the rift? Wait. The second the commercial version comes out, BUY IT. I sure as hell will. Don’t waste your money on the prototype though unless you simply have too much money in your pocket burning a hole in it. They are going to release soon. Just wait. It is going to be awesome.

edit: All this talk of the Rift made me crack open my case and pull it out to play with it… oh god I can’t wait for the commercial version with a high resolution display.

I totally concur with this. I got my rift in November. Used it continuously until I went on extended holidays in early December. It hasn’t been out of its box since then.

I won a round with it on TF2, which I find pretty hard with a mouse/keyboard. And minecraft is pretty blockily amazing. MC is particularly well suited to it due to the geometry. Tunneling is very claustrophobic and the drops in amplified are awesome.

But like Rindan says, the resolution is not good. It is like looking through a screen door. Okay, so you don’t have them in the UK – it is like looking through a fine mesh. Every so often you notice it.

Other posters have also mentioned concerns about the weight of it. This hasn’t been an issue with me.

As to buying a prototype vs the retail. The retail is still a while away. For the cost of three or four full priced games you can try it now. Only you can know whether that makes sense. All I know is that I haven’t regretted it, and it will be coming out of its box before too long.